Columnists From The United States

"If you’re going to cause a constitutional crisis, you may as well make it fun, right?...When Trump unleashed a disorganized, rambling, snarling, sniff-riddled word cloud on China, Korea, Syria, missiles, Obama, wars, duct tape, “bob” wire, Democrats, singsong Beat poetry, caravans and the stock market while announcing his illegal emergency declaration, it wasn’t fun. It was surreal to the point of brown-acid psychedelia, and it was perfectly terrifying in the main, but it wasn’t fun..."

"One of the most significant obstacles Trump’s declaration will face is sure to come from landowners, particularly in Texas. “More than 90 lawsuits involving landowners opposing the federal seizure of their property in South Texas remain open from 2008,” reports Ron Nixon for The New York Times. “The property owners have the support of many Texas politicians...and their opposition to a border wall could delay any construction by years while lawsuits wind through the court system.”"

"Sadism has even found a prominent position in popular culture.Many prime-time television series now owe their staying power to the sadistic impulses they exploit on the tube. Audience members find tremendous enjoyment in viewing horrified contestants who devour worms and insects on NBC’s Fear Factor; Donald Trump who exclaims without nuance, “You’re fired” on his wildly popular series, The Apprentice..."

"Chavez became the bugaboo of American politics because his full-throated advocacy of socialism and redistributionism at once represented a fundamental critique of neoliberal economics, and also delivered some indisputably positive results. Indeed, as shown by some of the most significant indicators, Chavez racked up an economic record that a legacy-obsessed American president could only dream of achieving."

"According to data compiled by the UK Guardian, Chavez's first decade in office saw Venezuelan GDP more than double and both infant mortality and unemployment almost halved. Then there is a remarkable graph from the World Bank that shows that under Chavez's brand of socialism, poverty in Venezuela plummeted (the Guardian reports that its "extreme poverty" rate fell from 23.4 percent in 1999 to 8.5 percent just a decade later). In all, that left the country with the third lowest poverty rate in Latin America."

"When a country goes socialist and it craters, it is laughed off as a harmless and forgettable cautionary tale about the perils of command economics. When, by contrast, a country goes socialist and its economy does what Venezuela's did, it is not perceived to be a laughing matter - and it is not so easy to write off or to ignore. It suddenly looks like a threat to the corporate capitalism, especially when said country has valuable oil resources that global powerhouses like the United States rely on. For a flamboyant ideologue like Chavez, that meant him being seen by the transnational elite as much more than an insignificant rogue leader of a relatively small country. He came to be seen as a serious threat to the global system of corporate capitalism. That, of course, is considered a high crime by the American political illuminati - a high crime prompting a special punishment."

"No doubt, there are few absolutely clear answers to those uncomfortable questions, if those questions are assessed honestly. Most likely, in fact, the answers are murky. But such questions need to be asked."

"At the moment Chavez's name is invoked, the conversation is inevitably terminated, ending any possibility of discourse. That is by design - it is what the longtime caricaturing and marginalizing of Chavez was always supposed to do. But maybe now that the iconoclast is dead, the cartoon will end. Maybe now Chavez's easily ridiculed bombast can no longer be used to distract from Venezuela's record - and, thus, a more constructive, honest and critical economic conversation can finally begin."

"Something I didn’t know: Beto O'Rourke is the #2 recipient of oil/gas industry campaign cash in the entire Congress."

"Half of America lives paycheck to paycheck Millions can't afford medical care Fossil fuel execs make bank while creating a climate crisis While pundits demand candidates look "not angry" at the #DemDebate, the fact is: if you aren't angry, you're probably super wealthy."

"I worked for Bernie right out of college... For 20 yrs, this...has made getting any job in politics/media far more difficult.... I speak from experience when I say that the hatred of him & his ideology by the political/media class is very real."

"Here’s Joe Biden. Note: this is not a speech from a long time ago. This is a speech from mid-2018. This seems very important... Biden explicitly says "Paul Ryan was correct when he did the tax code...the first thing we have to go after, [w:Social Security|SS]] and Medicare... It's the only way to find room to pay for it""

"Almost everyone else on the #DemDebate stage: health care is a human right, but we won't do anything to truly guarantee that right."

"Politicians often talk about “workers” but many of them do not actually say the word “union.” Bernie has been saying that word for decades and Warren in her opening video also said it. We will see if any other 2020 candidates are EXPLICIT in their support for the labor movement."

"Beto voted against his own party to pass GOP bills for business tax cuts, Wall St dereg, Trump’s deportation force, and chipping away at the ACA. It’s your right to argue thats totally OK — but let’s not use vague averages to obscure what his specific votes were about."

"Rep. Liz Cheney, daughter of Dick, is trying to prolong her father's in Afghanistan. You would think that every Democrat would be united in opposing such a policy, right? Well, you would be wrong. It’s not every day that you wake up in your blue state and learn that one of your newly elected Democratic congresspeople is joining with a Cheney to try to prolong the longest war in American history. But that's what happened this week, when Colorado's freshman Democratic Rep. Jason Crow teamed up with Republican Rep. Liz Cheney to advance legislation that would make it more difficult for any president to draw down troop deployments in Afghanistan. I live in the same media market as Crow's district. I can tell you that his 2018 campaign was focused on gun control. It was not a campaign promising voters that he would go to Washington to make common cause with Liz Cheney, and help her efforts to glorify and fortify her daddy's policy of endless war. But that’s exactly what his bill does."

"There’s an entire media & political industry whose entire mission is to pretend politics is always super complicated. But often times it’s pretty simple & straightforward: wealthy people like the status quo and like politicians who won’t change that status quo...."

"a lot of affluent liberals... hate Bernie & Warren hate them because Bernie/Warren basically reject the idea that we can just go back to the pre-Trump corporate status quo — a status quo that was great for affluent folks, and a crushing dystopia for millions of other people."

"Lots of progressives have legit criticism of Obama’s policy record. Much of the response to that criticism has been “Democratic voters love Obama, so anyone criticizing him is politically dumb!”"

"If an asteroid was headed toward Earth, I’d hope the presidential campaign narrative would revolve around who voted to accelerate the asteroid, who voted to slow the asteroid, and who has the best policy to divert the asteroid. In 2020, climate change is the asteroid."

"For weeks, Beto [O'Rourke] fans have attacked our reporting in an effort to intimidate journalists into not looking into his record. But now the Houston Chronicle is citing our reporting for having prompted a much needed debate about climate policy & his record."

"It would help if television shows elucidate the public policy records of the politicians running, so that voters can make policy-based — rather than personality-based — decisions on who to be passionate about. This seems particularly critical in the era of climate change."

"Personal opinion: I think it would be good for there to be a presidential debate in which the questions don’t come only from millionaires paid by billionaires."

"We... were slammed for publishing a deep-dive into the legislative record of Beto O'Rourke. That’s being courageously followed up by a Washington Post story touting Beto’s height, because apparently nothing matters.."

"So far in the #DemocraticDebate, there is @BernieSanders who says the wealthiest country in human history can afford to make sure its people don't die for lack of health insurance and can get a debt-free education, and then there are others who insist that's not possible."

"It’s almost as if much of the media has a mission to studiously avoid any serious discussion of policies that affect millions of people."

"Health care premiums are a huge, regressive corporate-controlled tax that enriches insurance CEOs. @BernieSanders' Medicare for All proposal would eliminate that tax, lowering the medical expense burden that is crushing the 99%"

"The first rule for every incoming freshman Democrat in Congress should be that you never work with a Cheney on war policy. The second rule for every freshman Democrat should be: re-read the first rule and make damn sure to follow it."

"Cheney initiatives that may seem superficially reasonable when calmly uttered by a Cheney usually have an insane ulterior motive. In this case, that truism applies: The Crow-Cheney legislation may sound like it includes reasonable requests, but they are designed to make the Afghanistan deployment permanent. In practice, nobody can predict with 100 percent certainty what will ensue once a nineteen-year ends. What we can know is that it’s a bad idea to continue a policy that isn’t working — and there’s plenty of evidence that it isn’t."

"After brushing aside the frenzied 2020 presidential hype and closely scrutinizing the public voting record of outgoing Rep. Beto O'Rourke (D-Texas), Capital & Main investigative journalist David Sirota published a detailed analysis on Thursday showing that the Texas congressman frequently voted to advance President Donald Trump and the GOP's right-wing agenda during his three terms in the House. Sirota's in-depth breakdown of O'Rourke's voting record sparked social media outrage from Democratic loyalists, who advanced the familiar claim that critically probing the record of potential Democratic presidential candidates is tantamount to helping Trump win reelection."

"As David Sirota framed it in The Guardian: “[D]espite the imminent climate catastrophe facing our planet, O’Rourke has often taken the side of carbon polluters.”"

"It would be nice if our political discourse could be rational enough to actually accept the science that says Obama’s historic oil production increases are bad for the planet, instead of looking at that science and just screaming “but Obama is popular among voters!”"

"The “new” war on conservatives on the internet is the same old attempt by desperate liberals to shut down their competitors in the marketplace of ideas. If you can’t beat ’em, deplatform ’em. That’s the progressive way. The right-wing solution is not to lie down, but to win over more converts, find new ways to disseminate our news and views, and turn up the heat. I’ve been doing it for 25-plus years and have no intention on cooling off, giving in or shutting up. Speak for those who have no voice. Support those speaking for you."

"Beneath their costumery of progressive benevolence, liberal Hollywood “helpers” and global do-gooders exhibit a cold indifference toward the actual wants and needs of their supposed beneficiaries in the Third World. They’re raising hundreds of millions for abortions, not for food, water and education."

"We live in a self-defeating culture that pays lip service to heroic action in times of crisis, yet brutally punishes the very kind of snap judgments and instant security profiling that make such heroism possible in the first place."

"Madison's argument is commonly cited in favor of civilian control of the military. But it applies as much to the police and their "war on crime," in which the "enemy" is not some foreign power but the public, or some portion of the public. "There's now a dominant military culture within modern"

"[M]ore gun laws and more enforcement of victimless gun crimes will mean more people in prison. Those new prisoners will be disproportionately black and Hispanic. These realities need to be part of the discussion."

"Americans still believe we live in a free society and revere its core values. These principles are pretty well known: freedom of speech, religion, and the press; the right to a fair trial; representative democracy; equality before the law; and so on. These aren't principles we hold sacred because they're enshrined in the Constitution, or because they were cherished by the Founders. These principles were enshrined in the Constitution and cherished by the Framers precisely because they're indispensable to a free society."

"[T]he typical person arrested for gun crimes is more likely to have the complexion of Shaneen Allen than, say, Sarah Palin."

"[G]un control laws passed in the late 1960s were in response to racial riots taking place across the country."

"Suffice it to say that from the pure "gun" side of it, the Five-seveN is a fascinating design that deserves a place in modern gun collections, and which has written a fascinating and complex chapter in the evolution of modern handguns."

"[T]he crime control policy most well-known, widely loathed and roundly condemned by racial justice activists — the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk policy — is at heart a gun control initiative. Its most high-profile champion is former mayor Michael Bloomberg, also a high-profile proponent of gun control laws like those in New Jersey."

"The Five-seveN has been loved and hated in the years since its introduction. It is one of the most controversial handguns of our time, and was so even before the Fort Hood atrocity."

"There was some brilliant use of polymer applied, and the result is a physically large pistol which, with magazine removed, weighs only 20.5 ounces on my scale. That’s less than the weight of a snub-nose Colt Detective Special, but depending on the magazine, the Five-seveN carries ten, twenty, or even thirty rounds of 5.7mm, compared to six rounds of .38 Special in the snubbie."

"Virulent populist movements have always existed in America, on the right (the Klan, say) and the left (the Weather Underground, say). Applebaum finds it surprising that its current incarnation emerged in the Republican Party...This is probably the place to note that Applebaum deserted the Republican Party in 2008, over the nomination of the “proto-Trump” Sarah Palin."

"The collapse of the Soviet Union 30 years ago was, for Anne Applebaum and many others of her generation, a stirring moment of "post-Cold War optimism," she writes, "a belief that 'we had won,' that the democratic revolution would now continue, that more good things would follow." Applebaum, a leading historian of the Communist era, now seeks to understand why the contrary happened—why authoritarianism is in the ascendant again."

"Applebaum’s political identity was made by her admiration for the moral courage of East European dissidents and her belief in the potential of the United States to make the world a better place."

"Applebaum has been active as a political commentator highly critical of Russia and Putin’s regime."

"So, yes, this is another mysterious death, but it is a new kind of mysterious death. With this plane crash, the violence on the periphery of Russia’s empire has now migrated to its very heart. Putin's rule has always been maintained by a heady combination of opportunism, bribery, and the facade of Russian nationalism, propped up by the subtle threat of violence. In the aftermath of Prigozhin's rebellion, Putin needs something more spectacular: theatrical, public violence; violence of the kind that brings down a plane soon after takeoff in the middle of a sunny day; violence designed to terrify anyone who secretly wished for Prigozhin’s victory."

"Instead of fighting ideological battles, [[Keir Starmer|[Keir] Starmer]] wanted the party to talk about ordinary people's problems—advice that Democrats in the United States, and centrists around the world, could also stand to hear."